The Princess Toad
by heartslogos
Summary: There was a time when people still called her Jane and she dreamed of being a princess with a prince. But she knows better now. Somewhere along the line Jane became Dolores and the princess became the witch.


**Disclaimer: I don't own **_**Harry Potter**_** or any of the references you may find here.**

* * *

When Dolores was very, very small her mother told her stories about, princesses who were cursed to be ugly or strange, fairies who always provided them comfort, and princes who always, _always_ saw through the flaws and loved the princess regardless, breaking the spell.

She was once told that she looked like a toad. A little squat toad.

Her favorite color, until then, had been green. Dolores may not have been old enough to understand the depth behind that insult, but she was old enough to realize that the tone it was spoken in was not flattering.

Dolores remembers stories that her mother used to tell her of fabulous princesses in pink and fairies in fantastic shades of lilac.

She's never really been fond of pink, but Dolores –in a childlike fashion, with childlike hope- figures that if she is a toad then princess pink should balance it out. Maybe, just maybe she'd find a prince to see past the toad and find the princess cursed with its form.

* * *

Dolores also remembers a time when people called her "Jane", her mother was "mummy", and people followed the rules and she wanted to be a "mummy" herself someday.

When she was Jane, Dolores remembers, she was much, much happier. When she had a "mummy" and a "daddy" who loved her and explained rules nicely to her in sweet voices.

Her mummy and daddy had very sweet voices.

It was always very pleasant to hear them speak. They would take her by her little hands, pet her curly mouse-brown hair, and speak quietly.

"_You mustn't lie Jane. It's very mean and it makes people dislike you. You must not tell lies."_

Even when Jane becomes Dolores and she loses almost everything that was Jane, she keeps those words in her heart. Dolores quickly learns that it's one of the only truths she can rely on.

* * *

When Dolores became Dolores it was when her "mummy" became "mother" and her "daddy" became a taboo.

To this day Jane –Dolores- still does not know what happened to him. She thinks that maybe if she gets strong enough, fights hard enough, protects herself long enough, she'll be the princess reunited with the king.

Her life quickly becomes a fairy tale. But as time goes by Jane –Dolores- loses hope of escaping.

Jane is the princess cursed to be a toad. Her mother –step-mother in this fairy tale parallel- replaces her deceased mummy, the queen and punishes her and her father, the king, has gone far, far away.

She hopes that a knight or a prince, and sometimes when she's very desperate, or a pauper comes to break the spell on her and take her away to a happy ending.

Mother yells and screams at her in a horrible croaking voice that she shouldn't lie. That she hates children. Not to call her "mummy" anymore. Her mother screams about how there must be order, that life isn't fair otherwise.

Her mother yells and rants. She punishes Jane and soon enough it becomes Dolores. Whenever she cries out for her mother to stop, that it hurts, that she's scared and that she wants daddy to come back her mother yells horrid sounding words about how horrible her daddy was.

She always defends him. Dolores always says how much she believes in him, that he will come back, that he is a good person. Or at least she used to.

Her mother makes her write. It hurts.

She writes the same sentence over and over, her mother says for however long it takes for the message to sink in. It takes long enough.

"_I must not tell lies."_

At the time Dolores doesn't understand. She's still very small, a little tadpole, and she's very scared. Like most children, she grows up to realize what her mother means.

* * *

When she gets her Hogwarts letter Dolores is delighted. She's been waiting for this day. This is her ticket to finding her prince.

She goes with her mother, her mother walking briskly as if trying to out walk her as if to leave her behind, into Olivander's.

They try wand after wand after wand. Her mother gets impatient and leaves. But Dolores continues onward. Olivander becomes more and more excited as they continue, its' a challenge, a game to him. How unusual, how old, how powerful will this wand be? Which wand that he's crafted with all his care will leave his shop after waiting for so long for its rightful owner?

When they finally find her wand Olivander frowns. It's not the right size for her. It's much too short. It's a wand that he's always considered a failure.

Dolores hears a voice snarks into her ear, _A failure like you_. That voice has slowly become a common enough occurrence in her mind that she is no longer startled by those words.

Bark of elder with a core of basilisk fangs. Elder means fairies and magic and all things Jane would have loved. Dolores wants to fall back on Jane, back to those happy times. She nearly cries.

It's the basilisk fang that stops her. Power. She would have power.

That day a new voice is born, a powerful voice that says _There will be order._

Dolores leaves that shop with hope.

* * *

When Dolores starts Hogwarts she quickly realizes that her prince might never come. She learns to accept that she might be a toad forever.

She's sorted into Hufflepuff. She knows what they say about Hufflepuff. _Boring, nothings that don't fit in the other houses because they're nobodies._

But she still hopes.

* * *

She sees a boy from Gryffindor. He looks just like a prince. He has golden hair and green eyes and he has a spectacular laugh and everything. It's almost too good to be true. The prince who will find the princess in the toad and set her free.

Dolores brings up the courage to talk to him during her second year.

He's nice enough to her. But she hears. She's small and unnoticeable so she hears everything.

"What's up with that toad?"

"Oh, her? She's a nobody."

"Then why do you keep her around? It makes me sick looking at her!"

"Really? I think it's funny looking at her. I mean, even her name is funny. What kind of stupid name is Dolores?"

Dolores understands that the prince isn't so beautiful.

She turns to the window and thinks about flinging herself out of it and seeing if a toad can turn into a bird like in transfiguration class and just fly away.

But life is no fairytale. She may be able to do magic, but she's not foolish enough to think that magic can solve everything.

Dolores throws herself into her studies. She becomes a master of attacking and striking just where it hurts most. She excels at attacking. And day by day it gets harder to strike back at her.

Within a year or so she becomes known as a fierce student.

Some wonder if she was meant to be in Slytherin or Ravenclaw.

Dolores thinks, as she ponders the root of her name, that her parents had excellent foresight.

Dolores. _Spanish root: Pain._

So much better than "Jane", plain and _useless,_ Hufflepuff Jane, she thinks.

* * *

But there are some who don't like her quick rise to favoritism.

Gryffindors are proud and courageous, but they are just as quick to anger. They corner her one day, and then they strike.

The lion is a very accurate representation of them, she thinks during her daze after the attack. Ferocious and violent, full of rage and danger and so _easy_ to provoke.

They hurt her and hex her and charm things to hit her too. There are no teachers or prefects around to stop them and no one else present even tries to stop them.

She doesn't even have a chance to strike back. It hurts.

Years later she still has her phobia of working with charms and hexes. She could never get around her fear of the backlash, she still remembers the pain.

The anger, the need for justice and retribution never fades. Even when she's taken away years later, she is still angry.

It just eats at her and eats at her. It just grows and grows and grows, with every strike against her it grows.

_I will have order._

That voice inside her, that voice born with her magic, it obliterates that other voice. That voice her mother plants in her is utterly crushed at that moment.

From that day on a mantra of _I will have order_ repeats in her head over and over. It never stops.

* * *

Even though she hates Gryffindors Dolores can't help her love for cats.

Small cats and kittens.

They're small and easy to tame and control. They are neat and precise and vicious.

She likes to watch them attack and play with their prey most of all.

So Dolores surrounds herself in pink and cats.

Pink because after so many years of believing she can't undo her faith. Nothing is more comforting than pink, nothing is more reminiscent of her childhood and her dreams of princesses and princes than pink.

It makes her feel hope.

* * *

When she tells her teachers about the attack they tell her she must not tell stories.

But they aren't stories. Dolores has stopped believing in stories for a long, long time.

The teachers tell her she's just looking for attention and that's not good. It's not good to lie.

"_You mustn't lie, Jane. It's very mean and it makes people dislike you. You must not tell lies."_

She remembers the words of her parents, clear as the crystal glass she sips her water from.

They tell her that her stories are nasty, that it's bad to seek attention this way.

And they punish her for lying.

They send her to detention, but it's nothing like what her mother's done to her before. This is tame compared to then. But it still has the same effect.

Dolores decides from that day on that she hates children and that someday she would return to Hogwarts to teach all these naughty children to behave.

* * *

When her mother dies Dolores doesn't shed a tear.

The part of her that's still Jane whimpers a little and she cries for her "mummy" but on the outside Dolores smiles pleasantly and answers the bringer of news, "Well, isn't that a shame".

She goes to the funeral dressed in darker shades of pink because she refuses to touch black. Black, the part of her that is Jane reasons, is the color of witches and ghouls and the nasty evil sisters and step-mothers.

She refuses to touch that color.

Relatives whisper about it. How scandalous and how inappropriate it was and didn't she have any shame, her mother is dead!

She smiles and laughs a little cough-chortle that she's developed. She clears her throat with a piercing saccharine sound.

"Excuse me. But you shouldn't tell nasty stories. It's awfully rude."

That shuts them up. She's pleased.

When they bury her mother Dolores takes one last look at the woman who raised her.

She looks nothing like the woman she remembers. In death her mother looks angelic, her face is relaxed and at peace, her thin and elegant fingers are poised and covered with rings. Dolores thinks that she almost sees a smile on her mother's face.

Maybe, Dolores thinks, that in the end it was her mother who was cursed. Maybe she was the beautiful woman cursed to become insane and unsure. And now she's been released.

She does not remember her mother's face very well. But she remembers her hands, to be specific, her fingers.

Dolores remembers that she's always been envious of those fingers. So light and delicate, so regal and elegant, they're tapered and thin. She can close her eyes and hear the melodies her mother could play on the piano in their parlor. She remembers that those fingers could tie bows with perfection and rub wounds so that they didn't hurt. Those fingers could cast spells that could last forever and could make the most delicious sweets in the world.

Those fingers could also punish. They could hit and pinch, poke and prod, smash and crush. Those fingers looked like vicious claws, bedecked in cold and angry jewels that gleamed with ferocious lights. Those fingers were frigid and uncaring.

But for those gentle touches of happiness were what mattered.

_I love you, mummy._

Dolores isn't sure if it was her or Jane who said that.

* * *

When Dolores first meets Cornelius Fudge she was working an underpaying, thankless, mindless job.

But he still told her he was doing well. He recognized her.

The next day she quit and swore to herself that she would follow this man. There was order, and damn it she would have it.

Dolores stopped believing in God a long time ago.

If the highest order couldn't make her a princess then she'd have to make her own order.

She remembers that day a long time ago in Diagon Alley. Basilisk fang. Power. She also remembers the promise of order she made to herself.

This man saw her in the darkness of obscurity and mindless mass of banality.

Surely, he would give her power and bring the order the world needed.

She slowly works up through the ranks of ministry. It all pays off when she becomes Under-secretary.

* * *

When she sees the Boy-who-lived for the first time, she is let down.

She believes that this child has restored order, that's what she thought when she first heard of him. True she felt a little disappointed that the purity of the world as promised by the Dark Lord was not going to happen.

The Dark Lord was Machiavellian. As a member of the Ministry of Magic she would not be able to support him. There is a certain order that must be followed after all, but secretly she wants him to win.

Sometimes the only way to win and get people to follow order is by force. If the ministry was just a little more authoritarian, she thinks, the world would be perfect.

There would be no pseudo-prince charming's, let down princess turned frogs, or wicked witches.

But she sees him, fifteen or so odd years later –Dolores has always been poor with time, time does not mean much to her, every year is the same monotony of anger and fear and thirst for justice- and is sincerely disappointed.

His hair is a mess, his clothes are wrinkled and rumpled and about two or three sizes too large, his speech is halting and confused, and he has a slouch. His glasses are repaired over and over. All in all he appears like someone the ministry has picked up on the streets, some sort of muggle.

If not for the faint, jagged scar of lightning she can see through his windswept bangs she would doubt his identity.

A flicker of recognition lights within her. She doesn't quite understand what the recognition is of though.

* * *

She becomes a teacher at Hogwarts and it's like her dream is finally coming true.

Dolores has fought and striven for power for a long, long time. She's gone through several trials, done much for her people, and upheld order for what seems an eternity.

As she sips her tea in her newly painted pink room she remembers the days when she dreamed of princesses and princes, witches and fairies.

It's like the story of Sleeping Beauty. Cursed to sleep for a long, long time and all those years pay of when she meets her prince charming.

But of course, life isn't a fairy tale.

Children are cruel, cruel creatures. She remembers from her own childhood of nightmares and cruelty.

And she also remembers who Potter reminds her off. The pseudo-prince charming who laughed at her behind her back, the man who took her as a fool.

And he lies, he tells nasty stories. He is, like all Gryffindors, rude and obnoxious.

She must fix this.

So she calls him in after class and has him write.

Sometimes it's much easier to teach children with physical consequences than verbal ones. She remembers this; she remembers white elegant fingers that strike at her like vipers, cold and unforgiving.

It hurt, she remembers that too, but she learned her lesson.

There's still time to fix this.

He looks at her with hatred and horror.

And he lies through his teeth.

"_Nothing" _

_"That's right, because you know deep down. You deserve to be punished, don't you Mr. Potter?"_

It makes her feel good.

* * *

When McGonagall stands up to her Dolores thinks that they might have been friends once.

But Minerva is too much like the princesses she used to dream about. Things work out for them. They believe and are good and work hard and everything they do is successful.

They are respected and loved, they are powerful and regal.

Dolores rather thinks that Minerva would be able to pull of the rings her mother wore. Minerva has that elegant air, her fingers are thin and bony but they are still just as regal as she is. Dolores knows that she's tried several times.

The poor results lie on her fingers like gaudy splashes of paint. Shining baubles click and clank on her fingers, hideous and ostentatious.

Her fingers are much too stubby, too much like a toad's to be regal and lovely. But they're strong and sturdy, they know work. Because Dolores has had to work from the very, very bottom of the world. She's crawled, like a toad, out of the scum of society and hung on with the tips of her nails.

People like Minerva don't know how hard it is to start from the bottom. McGonagall is like that, Dolores thinks.

Maybe if they had met earlier in life, maybe just maybe they could have been friends. Minerva has faith in the order of her world as it is and doesn't want to change it. She feels too much.

She does not realize that pain is necessary to fix things. In order to repair to rebuild things must first be broken down.

The weak must be sacrificed, the unnecessary shed, and the hindered left behind.

Only the strong survive and Dolores knows that she's worked hard to be strong.

* * *

These children push too far.

They ask about spells and practical uses. They do not have faith in the system. They must learn. It's like that exercise where you fall back and let someone catch you.

You must have faith.

There is no need for practice.

The ministry will defend. The ministry, the order she has built up and defended can handle anything.

When she brings in her own personal disciplinary force she has hope.

There was no one for her, to stop the attack, no one to stop people from laughing and taunting her.

And if they knew the full scope of magic who knows what they would do? How much pain they would inflict? Did they even know how much pain the can inflict with what limited magic they know?

Those children from before knew.

The Gryffindors knew.

Of course it would be Gryffindors who oppose her. Proud, damned people. The familiar rage burns inside her and she looks at the plates of cats on her walls.

Cats, she muses, are much smaller versions of lions. But these can be tamed and trained and punished.

She smiles.

Send in the snakes and soon the lions shall die. What use is their power and ferocity when they cannot strike at their target?

She sips her tea and feels at peace. Order will come to Hogwarts, it's long overdue, and she –oh, how proud she is of this!- is the one who shall bring it!

* * *

"_I am a tolerant woman, but one thing I won't stand for is disloyalty."_

Dolores doesn't lie.

Oh she knows she is never to lie. And she never has. She's simply omitted the truth when necessary.

She does not lie and she does not betray. She follows rules to a letter, and if she sometimes goes through the spirit of the letter instead of physical ink on paper, well then the results certainly forgive the actions.

Once Dolores starts something she is sure to finish it.

In all the books they mention the evil and scheming witch and the faithful and loyal royals.

They never mention how those royals fall out of faith and the scheming witch remains honest about her intentions until the very end.

"_But I don't want to be a witch!"_

Jane's voice cries to her, a memory long since passed.

Dolores ignores it and eventually, Jane's voice –her voice, is it her voice? Dolores doesn't even know anymore- fades away.

Sometimes people have to make sacrifices to achieve goals.

* * *

"_What Cornelius doesn't know won't hurt him."_

Don't these people understand?

There is law and order, but there must be some sort of pillar.

In order to keep society clean and pristine, blissful and functional it must stay above the filth of anarchy and lawlessness.

And of course the pillars will not stay pristine. Those pillars will take up the filth and protect society.

Dolores is not so foolish as to think that she is not one of those pillars.

Order cannot stay orderly without sacrifices. Dolores will gladly sacrifice her own personal order if it means upholding the greater one.

Sacrifice is the name of the game that keeps the world running. It's the main theme of every fairy tale and the basic essential of life.

Passing by a mirror Dolores doesn't realize that her reflection has changed.

She sees the toad. She wonders where Jane has gone. Where did the princess in a toad's form go?

Now she's a toad. She's taken society's filth and become the wicked witch everyone fears. But isn't that good?

The voice inside her whispers, its voice saccharine and cloying.

_I will have order._

* * *

"_You know, I really hate children."_

Dolores says this partly to Potter and Granger in front of her, partly to the invisible face of Cornelius who gave her this job –more like forced it on her-, but mostly to herself.

To Jane.

She hates children.

How they lie and how they are so innocent and naive, which makes them cruel.

And it's sad the way children believe so much. They think that if they do the right thing everything will turn out right. That there can't be any sort of dark parts along the path of their story.

But obviously they don't know real stories.

The heroine suffers.

The hero never comes in time.

The villain always gets his way and dies satisfied.

The fairy doesn't watch very closely.

The king and the princess never reunite.

The evil-stepmother wins and the wicked step-sister get the prince.

The curse never gets lifted.

The princess learns to live with it and becomes the witch.

That's right Jane.

_You must not tell lies._

And fairy tales are lies.

Power, authority, that's what is needed in order to survive. In the real world there is no need for wishes and hope.

In the real world there are only those with power and those too weak to seek it.

And Dolores knows that she's worked hard to find it. She's grappled and fought to tame and hold it in her grasp.

* * *

"_Do you know who I am? I am Dolores Jane Umbridge!"_

But, the voice that Dolores thought was silenced a long time ago –Jane's voice-, power doesn't mean you are loved.

_And I just want to be free._

In her last moments of lucidity Dolores can't seem to recall if that voice was the one that called for order, or the voice that her mother planted within her that she thought she killed, her own voice, or perhaps Jane's.

But maybe, just maybe…it was the princess inside.


End file.
